The Dance
by Ralspudzinmoose
Summary: Right after it- that day- happened, John felt like he was falling as well. He felt like a plate haphazardly shoved over the edge of the table, everyone lunging out with open hands to catch it, and then having missed by inches, watching wide-eyed with baited-breath to see if he would break.


Title: The Dance

Song: Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens, 1874

Summary: John has a particular relationship with death. Death is rather fond of him too.

Rating: pg-13/ K+

Pairing: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Mary Morstan & John Watson, maybe Johnlock if you squint really hard.

Genre: drama/angst metafic one-shot

Length: 2182

Warnings: post-reichenbach, character deaths, mourning Sherlock.

Author notes: written for LetsWriteSherlock challenge 3

_I had a peculiar friend in Doctor John. H. Watson, formerly of Baker Street, and he with I. We met young, in the form of an unloved black and white cat that made the gross error of freezing in the midst of oncoming traffic. John was 3 years, 9 months and 3 days old, and I was blunt and shocking. I do not recall him crying. I do recalling him asking. _

'_But where did it go?'_

_He will, like the rest of his kind, have to deduce that for himself._

Right after it- that day- happened, John felt like he was falling as well. He felt like a plate haphazardly shoved over the edge of the table, everyone lunging out with open hands to catch it, and then having missed by inches, watching wide-eyed with baited-breath to see if he would break.

Instead, the first 'bounce' carried him through the funeral. A bit messily, but he made it, still all in one piece. Managed to say his bit during the ceremony; managed to say the other bit later before the grave too, and throughout that, managed to hold himself together. Of course, there were concessions. He allowed himself silence. He'd allowed himself one agonising night on the sofa of 221b Baker Street, letting the hurt and loss wash over him until he felt he'd been erased by grief. He'd expected to break then, but when Mrs. Hudson had crept up in the morning to bring him tea and a sympathetic face, he'd gotten up and found himself worn soft at the edges, but still whole- a stub of a man, but still a man.

Still they all held out their hands.

_People are like that. They do not see how profoundly adapted they are to absorb the little flirtations I have with their lives. More than any other creature that draws breath, they realize me, discuss me, make an art of me, but they always credit me with entirely too much tyranny. _

_If my power were absolute, if my duties were so transmutably destructive to those around me, there would scare be one of you left._

_And yet look at you all. _

John feels like a hypocrite. Everyone's expecting him to shatter; no one can imagine him being able to start living on autonomously after 'Sherlock-and-John'.

Yet somehow he is.

It feels complicated, because moving on and learning to live without Sherlock is what everyone hopes he can do, but at the same time, the pragmatic reality disappoints all the more romantic expectations. They don't want to see him weep, but they would like to know that he has at some point done so. They don't want to see him suffer, but a grief concealed is unhealthy, and a loss without any sign of suffering at all is an uncomfortable deviation to be avoided, if only out of respect for the dead.

So John weeps when no one is looking and suffers deeply and lets his grief out in carefully measured drips. This is not, however, from a sense of misplaced duty or decorum. It's simply his nature.

When the suffering becomes a little less immediate he begins living properly again, keeping the residual grief within himself, cool and silent as a well.

_Let it not be thought that I am without my merits. More has been achieved by the human race in pursuit of my eradication than by mere living alone. Wherever I go, I provide education. Compared to what costs you expend upon one another, the rates of my school are even quite low. _

_John enrolled in spring 1990. There were two classes between then and 1994. The first was 'time'. The second was 'direction'. Another elective later: 'waste'._

_He passed them all superbly._

His therapist wants to talk about it. He still refuses to discuss Him with her, so as that door is firmly locked, she tries sneaking in through a window. "Tell me about your mother."

He does, because it pacifies her and that's an old loss that's become sweeter with time and he doesn't mind it so much any more. They go back and forth over the events- when she told him she had cancer, the treatment, the recovery, the second decline, the death and how it all influenced him towards medicine, but how that ended up with surgery, not research.

They talk about his father's death, which he minds a bit more, because feelings at the time were mixed, and he's already had this picked out of him in the first round of post-Afghanistan therapy. The man lived, wasted his life, and died an uninspiring death. He'd gained from it was a sense of regret, resentment and a vow not to end up like that, and he was at relative peace with those gains.

They backtrack to the first death and talk about his grandmother. Nice woman- John wishes he'd known her more closely. The therapist tries to read a little deeper into the story but the fact remains that she was old and she died of age, and it wasn't really any more traumatic than it was for any other kid. She implies maybe it affected him subconsciously, and John makes small 'maybe' noises and considers firing her.

_There are naturally certain professions with whom I rub shoulders more often than others. Beekeeping is one you might not expect, but bees are my messengers, and my darlings. If you see me, be sure to tell the bees. Healers and killers are the more obvious examples, and whilst they no longer overtly pay homage at my temple, I am still often the recipient of sacrificial offerings. _

_What amazes me is the bartering. "If you let me live, I'll be a better person. Oh please, please, I don't want to die." _

_To whom are they speaking? Sometimes, they make it clear but still so many of these little messages get sent out unaddressed and without ever an answer expected. _

_I do what I can, but alas, I my answers are regrettably limited._

The first hospital death was hard. You always wonder if it was something you did, or didn't do, or could have done but didn't realise until the crucial window of opportunity was already long gone. The first army death was harder. The abruptness of it was shocking. A man with you, talking one minute and cooling meat the next, but he oddly didn't mind the order and efficiency of the funeral. It was kindly but perfunctory, and then soon you all went back to work.

After that, death becomes a colleague, and you learn to work by factoring it into the equation at all times.

After shooting the cabbie, John wondered if he'd become a little too numb to it all. It had been a very easy decision to make, but perhaps not the decision others would have found so clear-cut. By the time poor Soo Lin dies, the callous he'd formed through the army is peeling and her last living act is to rip it off entirely.

The cases bring with them other deaths; some of which John minds, some of which he minds deeply, but others barely bother him at all. Sometimes it helped that Sherlock doesn't seem to be so concerned by other people dying. In those cases John found himself allowed to react more, in compensation. Point out the value of human life and the need for respecting it. This makes people think he's a better man than Sherlock Holmes.

John isn't so sure.

_Sherlock Holmes: a name for the ages- a man who will take a very long time to die. Perhaps more than a hundred years. _

_If you are wondering why I don't consider him my 'particular' friend, you have not been listening carefully enough. Oh he is a curiosity. Do not mistake me. We find each other mutually fascinating, and when I gather him in my arms at the close, I have no doubt it will be with open eyes, like greeting a lover. _

_Nonetheless, he is but the acolyte in these affairs. There is much he has to learn. He can tell you the technicalities of my work, but it is Doctor Watson who understands the art of it. _

_Why? Lean close. I'll whisper it._

_It's because Sherlock Holmes is only a good man, not a killer._

John's religion is no more than a Church of England education, a collection of vague uncertainties he's never sought to clarify, and blasphemy. He tries the church once, to see if that can help, but in the end he speaks to no one other than the woman wearily sketching the stain-glass windows. She's not religious either.

They talk awhile. She discloses the death of her father and that now she works as an au pair. John tells her he's a doctor, mutually ignores the fact that she recognises him, and she doesn't ask. It's escapism pure and simple. He appreciates talking to someone who understands what it means to be sick of sympathy. They do not arrange to meet again, exactly, and if he mentions he usually visits the graveyard on Sundays, and she mentions she finds the place quietest on Wednesdays, well. That's just conversation.

He takes Mrs Hudson with him sometimes; it's quite far for her to go alone. She always brings flowers.

"Not that he'd really have cared, but I don't like to see a bare grave when all the rest have something. Makes him seem unloved."

John thinks Sherlock would have revolted at the idea of such convention, because what was the opinion of the dumb public horde worth anyway? Even in death he strives to stand apart- the one glossy modern stone amongst a spattering of far older ones, and even those at a distance. Nonetheless her actions are touching, and he values them enormously.

He values them more when he leaves for a two week holiday for the first time and comes back to find the grave becoming overgrown with summer weeds and the flower pot stolen.

It works him up almost to the point of angry tears. Vindictively he scrawls 'fuck you, Mycroft' as boldly as he can with a biro and shoves it in the lens of a CCTV camera on the way home.

Mycroft never visits, and never answers on that particular occasion.

John buys a new flowerpot himself. En route to installing it at the grave, he bumps into the woman again. This time she asks if he's ok. This time he lets a little more of himself slip. She listens with more even-mindedness than his therapist.

"Tell me, next time," she says simply, when he's done berating thieves, "I'll keep an eye on it, if you like. I'm here every week anyway."

When John goes home, he's warmed with gratitude instead of anger.

_Is this what you mortals call irony? Doctor Watson, mourning a man I had yet to touch, and falling in love with a woman already bearing my thumbprint under her left breast. Try not to bear it against her- she didn't know how closely she'd started walking to me until much later and besides, many wives and husbands are unfaithful to their spouses with me. _

_By the time she slipped under my arm, quite sweetly, John Watson had earned his doctorate at my school- 'endurance', she a PHD in 'love'. _

_And by that time, a miracle had occurred. A disappearing act reversed, with I the glamorous assistant. _

John has never been so distraught or angry as he is when he realizes Sherlock was never dead. He has never been so overwhelmed with a joy so strong it hurts, and a simultaneous need to share _how much_ it hurts by repeated punching. Sherlock struggles to understand what three years of loss compacted into a single moment and inverted on itself can feel like. John is breathless from shouting.

Sherlock explains the justifications, the logic of his actions and John nods in perfect willing understanding before punching him again. Forgiveness takes a bit longer. Sherlock doesn't hold out for 'forgetting', but John does come close when he remains when Mary departs. It's not mentioned again after that. The lessons have been learnt- there is work to be done and lives to be experimented with through the medium of living them, hopefully for a long time.

Together.

_I have had, have and will have a peculiar friend in John Hamish Watson. He was not the first to be touched by someone wearing my gloves and mask; he will not be the last. People like to use my name for their own ends, and I cannot say I especially mind, for the truth will out at the end of things, and that is a fact inescapable. _

_I am always, alone, at the end of each and every road. _

_However, should you be brave, and careful, possessing of good fortune and resilience, then you might just arrive to my garden by the long road._

_Help yourself to the honey. _


End file.
